Wikipedia is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration project by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web and is one of the most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of January 2020. It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads, and is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.
Wikipedia has proved to be a very important information resource for librarians and catalogers. Many times a librarian or cataloger needs information that is required by a library user or he/she wants to know about some topic to help understand the subject of a book in order to provide metadata for the book in its catalog record. Wikipedia is also encouraging librarians to become contributors to Wikipedia to make it more informative.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined its name, as a portmanteau of "wiki" (the Hawaiian word for "quick) and "encyclopedia". Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions of Wikipedia in other languages were quickly developed. With at least 6,007,958 articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per month.
In 2005, Nature published a peer-review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica, although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues. The following year, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.
In 1996 Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego, California, to establish Bomis, Inc., a Web portal company. In March 2000 Wales founded Nupedia, a free online encyclopaedia, with Larry Sanger as editor in chief. Nupedia was organized like existing encyclopaedias, with an advisory board of experts and a lengthy review process. By January 2001 fewer than two dozen articles were finished, and Sanger advocated supplementing Nupedia with an open-source encyclopaedia based on wiki software. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched as a feature of Nupedia.com, but, following objections from the advisory board, it was relaunched as an independent Web site a few days later. In its first year Wikipedia expanded to some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, including French, German, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese, and Esperanto. In 2003 Nupedia was terminated and its articles moved into Wikipedia.
WIKIPEDIA QUIZ
SEE ALSOWikipedia has proved to be a very important information resource for librarians and catalogers. Many times a librarian or cataloger needs information that is required by a library user or he/she wants to know about some topic to help understand the subject of a book in order to provide metadata for the book in its catalog record. Wikipedia is also encouraging librarians to become contributors to Wikipedia to make it more informative.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined its name, as a portmanteau of "wiki" (the Hawaiian word for "quick) and "encyclopedia". Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions of Wikipedia in other languages were quickly developed. With at least 6,007,958 articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per month.
In 2005, Nature published a peer-review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica, although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues. The following year, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.
In 1996 Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego, California, to establish Bomis, Inc., a Web portal company. In March 2000 Wales founded Nupedia, a free online encyclopaedia, with Larry Sanger as editor in chief. Nupedia was organized like existing encyclopaedias, with an advisory board of experts and a lengthy review process. By January 2001 fewer than two dozen articles were finished, and Sanger advocated supplementing Nupedia with an open-source encyclopaedia based on wiki software. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched as a feature of Nupedia.com, but, following objections from the advisory board, it was relaunched as an independent Web site a few days later. In its first year Wikipedia expanded to some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, including French, German, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese, and Esperanto. In 2003 Nupedia was terminated and its articles moved into Wikipedia.
WIKIPEDIA QUIZ
- ‘Wikipedia’ owned by the non-profit “Wikipedia Foundation” was launched on January 15, 2001 by : [(1) Jimmy Wells and Larry Sanger (2) Jimmy Wells and Vincent J. Aceto (3) Larry Sanger and W. Kathy (4) William A. Ford and W. Kathy]
REFERENCES
1. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia (accessed on February 2, 2020).
2. Wikipedia. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wikipedia (accessed on February 2, 2020).
CITATION INFORMATION
Article Title
- Wikipedia
Website Name
- Librarianship Studies & Information Technology
URL
- https://www.librarianshipstudies.com/2020/02/wikipedia.html
Last Updated
- 2020-02-02
Original Published Date
- 2020-02-02
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